Steve St. Angelo steps down as Toyota Latin American head

Steve St. Angelo said he will be retiring from Toyota and returning to the U.S.

TOKYO — Steve St. Angelo, the American production guru who rose through the ranks at Toyota Motor Corp. to become CEO of its Latin American and Caribbean operations, is stepping down.

Toyota announced the move March 1 as part of a wider companywide personnel shuffle.

St. Angelo's departure is effective April 1. Succeeding him will be Masahiro Inoue, who currently is St. Angelo's deputy, the company said in a statement.

In a separate email, St. Angelo said he will be retiring from Toyota and returning to the U.S.

Steve St. Angelo, shown here in a 2016 photo, revamped Toyota's production footprint and sales network in South America to buttress Toyota against the region's roiling economy.

St. Angelo, 63, joined Toyota in 2005, after years at General Motors. The Detroit native became president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, in 2006 and a managing officer at the Japanese parent company in 2009, on the eve of the carmaker's unintended acceleration crisis.

He rose to prominence during the recall scandal when President Akio Toyoda tapped him as the American voice on a global quality committee charged with finding the root causes of the problem and devising ways to fix them so they would never be repeated.

St. Angelo revamped Toyota's production footprint and sales network to buttress Toyota against the region's roiling economy. In the first nine months of the current fiscal year ending March 31, Toyota's wholesale volume in Central and South America rose to 351,000 vehicles, from 335,000 the year before.

Toyota expects sales there to total 450,000 vehicles for the full fiscal year. That would be up from 445,000 vehicles last year and up from 364,000 in the year before St. Angelo took over.